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DAWN—Irving Bacheller—Mac-millan ($2.50). According to St. John, a bad woman was brought to Jesus and he said to her, "Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more." According to Irving Bacheller, her name was Doris. He recounts where she came from, where she went when Christ said "go. . . ."
Doris was not a bad woman at all, but her love affair with Apollos, a Jew, had a pronounced geographical tendency that kept getting her into scrapes. She even had a child by Vespasian when the future emperor was only a centurion. Her wanderings make the frame of this novel wide. Her adventures, which are as unintermittent as they are various, provide bright colors for the picture.
It is a pretentious picture and Author Bacheller is proud of it. If he had written a more humble book more humbly he would have written a better book.
Mercenaries
THE BAND PLAYS DIXIE—Morris Markey—Harcourt, Brace ($2). Author Markey, the latest recruit to that swelling corps of young Manhattan newsgatherers who write disillusioned novels about wars, is not unaccomplished. His story has many an authentically stirring moment—a Yankee band challenging the Rebels with "Dixie" before the carnage at Fredericksburg; a sardonic Southern gallant shooting between his horse's ears on a midnight pursuit; the preparations for a lonely sabre duel; a bright-haired Richmond belle riding through magnolia-fragrant lanes and other pleasant spots. But the story itself is less satisfactory. The web of realism hangs loosely upon its romantic skeleton. Two cousins Hale, Canadians, are turned from Federal mercenaries into Confederate impostors, and from comrades into enemies, by the circumstances of being wounded and imprisoned, and of seeing Camilla Dame (heroine) walking in her pretty garden. Kirk Hale, the cousin to whom the author devotes most of his attention, is as thoroughly a blackguard in his way as was Captain Flagg of What Price Glory, the model hero-villain of all Park Row War fiction. Only, unfortunately, he is a dull blackguard, subject to long states of his author's laboring mind. Similarly Anthony Hale, the noble cousin: his silence is not eloquent.
*PALMERSTON—Philip Guedalla—Putnam ($5).
†He was a Viscount of the Irish peerage, i. e., although an English nobleman he had no seat in the House of Lords. For 40 years he steadily refused to accept an English Earldom.
**If the Devil has a son,
Surely he is Palmerston.
*HAWKERS AND WALKERS IN EARLY AMERICA—Richardson Wright—Lippincott ($4.50).
*Author Gorky's real name: Alicksei Maximovitch Pieshkov.